our world in data land use
Use the different filters to begin mining this unique open data collection. The dataset comprises eleven series of land use/land cover (LULC) maps, each corresponding to one city in India—Ahmedabad, Belgaum, Hindupur, Hyderabad, Jalna, Kanpur, Parbhani, Pune, Singrauli, Sitapur, or Vijayawada—and containing one map per … However, it’s important to note the differences in land required across the meat products: poultry and pork have a land footprint 8-10 times lower than that of beef. Land use is the purpose of human activity on the land; it is usually but not always related to the land cover. Guest article by Kristen Carney and Aaron Herman of Cubit.. Finding land use land cover data is a pain. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.3The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. The Americas (North and South) and Africa have notably higher per capita agricultural land use relative to Europe and Asia. There are a number of older datasets in the same vein which may be useful if you're interested in changing land cover over time: LCM2000 and LCMGB1990 . Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution. It covers five important environmental impact indicators : land use; freshwater withdrawals weighted by local water scarcity; and GHG, acidifying, and eutrophying emissions. Land Use and Productivity Data Description. total build-up land (villages, towns, cities & infrastructure) would fit into an area the size of Libya; shrub land is equivalent to an area the size of East Asia-Pacific, from Malaysia southwards; barren land is equivalent to the size of Europe; glaciers (permanent ice & snow) approximates to an area of Antarctica & Greenland combined. The figures given here are slightly lower for protein production (37% of the world total) because seafood from wild capture fisheries are not included (as they are not grown on terrestrial land). (2010) found that by 2000, 55% of Earth’s ice-free (not simply habitable) land had been converted into cropland, pasture, and urban areas. The datasets below have been drawn from a wide range of international data sources and cover an equally broad spectrum of land-related themes and issues. values in 1961 are equal to 1.0. The maximum idle period is usually less than five years.’. Total. This means individuals can make notable reductions in the environmental impact of their diets simply by substituting lower-impact meat products for beef or mutton. Total land area used for oilcrop production has increased almost 3-fold since 1961– an area just short of the size of Mexico. Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture.2. Even though the world population is still increasing! Rural poverty, rapid urbanization, equity, and environmental degradation have placed land at the center of many of the world's pressing challenges. Other studies confirm this distribution of global land: in an analysis of how humans have transformed global land use in recent centuries, Ellis et al. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 19(5), 589-606. For most countries, the majority of agricultural land is used for livestock rearing in the form of pastureland. Agricultural land consumes a slightly disproportionate share at 38 percent of the world's land area. DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2013.00561.x. Unless your project is within an MPO/COG that has historic and current land use shapefiles that are easy for your GIS guru to access, you can be up a creek without a paddle when it comes to finding good land use data.. Overall we see that the arable land use per capita has declined across all regions since 1961. It also has been defined as "the total of arrangements, activities, and inputs that people undertake in a certain land type." With solutions from both consumers and producers, we have an important opportunity to restore some of this farmland back to forests and natural habitats. The global average per capita protein availability from vegetal products was 49 grams per person per day, and 32g from animal products. The idea for this chart is taken from Ausubel, Wernick, and Waggoner (2013).5, The authors write: ‘A combination of agricultural technologies raised yields, keeping downward pressure on the extent of cropland, sparing land for nature.Countering the global rise of population and affluence by parents and workers, consumers and farmers restrained the expansion of arable land by changing tastes and lifting yields. Globalands WP 1.1 und 1.4 7 Figure 30: Changes in land cover and land-use in Central Asia from 1982 to 2000; Bare lands (degraded land, deserts). But we are also studying other uses of land, including land required for human settlement. Forest area (% of land area) Rural land area where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total land area) Urban land area where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total land area) This resource is kept up-to-date with all of the latest data across all of the 17 Goals. To provide data that can be used in land cover and land use change (LCLUC) studies, agricultural applications, and to assist with policy-making in regards to sustainable agricultural intensification. The groupings and definitions shown below are based on the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and should therefore be consistent with most international data sources. Overall, we see that the majority of our arable land is used for cereal production; this has grown from around 650 to 720 million hectares (an area roughly twice the size of Germany) over this period. Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000. It’s important to note that this metric includes both land used for arable (cropland) production and pasture land for livestock grazing; this means that agriculture can consume a large share of land area, even in arid and semi-arid regions where extensive arable farming is not possible. For comparison: The area of the USA, Canada and China are all short of 1,000 million ha (USA 963 million ha, China 932 million ha, Canada 909 million ha). Data for “Arable land” are not meant to indicate the amount of land that is potentially cultivable. This data is sourced from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The 1km raster uses a simplified ten-fold classification scheme and is free for commercial use; the other two use 23 land cover classes and are only free for academic purposes. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares. There are some notable exceptions, however; countries in South Asia and Europe allocate a large share of land area to arable farming. In the latest data (2013), 31% of global fish stocks were overexploited (overfished). This visualisation shows total grazing land over the long-term, measured in hectares. Rates of reduction in South Asia have been the most dramatic; per capita land use in 2014 was roughly one-third of its value in 1961. License: All the material produced by Our World in Data, including interactive visualizations and code, are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. As a contrast to arable farming, land use for livestock in Europe and South Asia, in particular, is typically less than 20 percent. This can also be viewed by select countries and all regions using the “change country/region” option. If you are the actual owner of the real estate you want to digitalize, and upon verification of the legal information you provided, your newly created LAND ID will receive the “Verified” status. Our World In Data is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1186433). Land Use in Selected Indian Cities. If we view the map in “chart” mode, we see how the allocation of land to agriculture has changed over time across the global regions. Note that these are not used to represent the distribution of each: this figure does not mean the United States is wholly used for livestock, or that Europe comprises only of barren land. Select a local authority on page 1 or select a land use and see how it varies across the country on page 2. This is the definition given by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in their glossary that is online here. But how much of total land area is utilised for agriculture across the world? Table 4. Allocation ranges from less than ten percent, particularly across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Scandinavian region to close to 80 percent across most regions (including the UK, Uruguay, South Africa, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia). In the chart here we see a global map of land used for arable agriculture (as a share of total land area). For example, globally in 2014, the index value was 0.3; this means only 30% of the arable land area was needed to produce the same quantity of crops relative to 1961. License: All the material produced by Our World in Data, including interactive visualizations and code, are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. The agricultural area is the sum of arable land, permanent crops, permanent meadows and pastures. 8 août 2017 - Increasing the production of crops per area of land is of key importance for food security, living standards, and decreasing humanity’s impact on the environment. How the world’s land is used: total area sizes by type of use & cover, Pastureland (permanent meadows and pasture), Arable land needed per unit of crop production. India Village-Level Geospatial Socio-Economic Data Set, v1 ( 1991, 2001 ) In 2019, 24,001 species were threatened by ‘agriculture and aquaculture’. Land use in Asia– both in South and East Asia is lowest (5-6 times less than in North America). In some countries (particularly in Central Asia, including Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan) this can reach up to 70 percent. All the material produced by Global Change Data Lab, including interactive visualizations and code from our partner project Our World in Data, are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. The most dramatic increase in land allocation is in the production of oilcrops. Our World in Data (OWID) is supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation … At the upper end of the spectrum we find meat products, with the land required for beef or mutton up to 100 times larger than cereals. So agricultural land use did not increase much and is projected to shrink over the next decades. This visualization shows the index of the arable land area needed to produce an equivalent aggregate of crop production, relative to the land area needed in 1961 i.e. This visualisation shows total land used for agriculture (which is a combination of cropland and grazing land) over the long-term, measured in hectares. Target 15.1 for Goal 15 is to ensure conservation, restoration and sustainable use of forests by 2020. This data can be viewed for other countries and regions by selecting ‘ Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). In the chart here we see the global area of land use in agriculture by major crop types, from 1961 to 2014. This means in particular that the Global land cover 2000 dataset is a main input dataset to define the boundaries between ecosystems such as forest, grassland, and cultivated systems. But we are also studying other uses of land, including land required for human settlement. This category includes flowering shrubs, fruit trees, nut trees and vines, but excludes trees grown for wood or timber. This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure. Please consult our full legal disclaimer. The FAO explains the construction of the PIN in detail here. Our World In Data is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1186433). Despite this uncertainty, most analyses tend to converge on an estimate of close to half of habitable land being used for agriculture. All of our charts can be embedded in any site. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. The major uncertainties – and explanation for discrepancies – in these assessments is the allocation of ‘rangelands’: in some regions it can be difficult to accurately quantify how much of rangelands are used for grazing, and how much is free from human pressure. Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. It is therefore useful to understand the differences between land use terminology; for example, the definition of “arable land” versus “agricultural land”. by Peter Kerins, Brook Guzder-Williams, Eric Mackres, Taufiq Rashid and Eric Pietraszkiewicz - February 2021. Our Impact on Climate Change and Land Use in 5 Charts As the world population approaches the eight billion mark, it’s becoming clear that we’re impacting the planet in unprecedented ways. Population and Development Review, Volume 38, Issue Supplement s1, pages 221–242, February 2013. It has transformed habitats and is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity: of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them.4 But we also know that we can reduce these impacts – both through dietary changes, by substituting some meat with plant-based alternatives and through technology advances. For much of human history, most of the world’s land was wilderness: forests, grasslands and shrubbery dominated its landscapes. All the data can be downloaded freely for use offline. Our World in Data: the empirical evidence of how living standards are changing www.OurWorldinData.org is a web publication - authored by Max Roser - that tells the social, economic, and environmental history of our world up to the present day – based on empirical data …